Israel and the Middle East News Update Monday, January 14 Headlines: ​ ● Israel, in Rare Admission, Confirms Syria Strike ● Lapid and Livni Said to Be in Serious Unity Talks ● Lapid Pledges Not to Join Coalition if Netanyahu Indicted ● IDF Chief Urges Aid to Palestinian Security Forces ● Erdan: Israel Should Punish Abbas Over Gaza Measures ● Funding Shortage Leads to Cuts in Palestinian Food Aid ● Palestinians to Take Over Largest UN Bloc on Tuesday ● Smotrich vs. Ariel in National Union Primary Commentary: ● Forward: “How President Rivlin Appeals To Diaspora Jews” − By Jane Eisner, Editor-in-Chief ● New York Times: “The Man Who Humbled Qassim Suleimani” − By Bret Stephens, Senior Columnist S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace 633 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, 5th Floor, Washington, DC 20004 The Hon. Robert Wexler, President ● Yoni Komorov, Editor ● Aaron Zucker, Associate Editor ​ ​ News Excerpts ​ January 14, 2019 The New York Times Israel, in Rare Admission, Confirms Syria Strike Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged on Sunday that Israeli forces had attacked Iranian weapons warehouses in Syria. The rare admission came hours after the military announced it had exposed the sixth and final tunnel under its border with Lebanon, which it says the Iranian-backed Hezbollah dug, wrapping up a six-week operation to seal the cross-border tunnels. By lifting the veil on its campaign to curb Iranian influence, Israel appeared to be trying to convey confidence that the threats from across its northern frontiers were under control. Ha’aretz Lapid and Livni Said to Be in Serious Unity Talks The Yesh Atid and Hatnuah parties are holding serious talks on running a joint ticket in the upcoming Israeli election. Party leaders Yair Lapid and Tzipi Livni met several times over the past few days since Labor Chair Avi Gabbay ended his party’s alliance with Hatnuah. Livni is reportedly not demanding the number one slot on a unified Knesset roster with Yesh Atid. Lapid reportedly sees unifying with Livni as the opportunity to win seats from Labor, and to pull ahead of the new party headed by former Israeli army chief of staff Benny Gantz, and then negotiate to join Gantz in a unified bloc against Netanyahu. Times of Israel Lapid Pledges Not to Join Coalition if Netanyahu Indicted Lapid on Saturday stated that he will not join a Netanyahu-led government if the attorney general announces an intention to indict the prime minister, even before the hearing process has been completed. Lapid and Gantz have faced calls from Gabbay not to join a Netanyahu-led government. Moshe Kahlon of the Kulanu party also said he would not sit in a government led by Netanyahu if charges are filed after a hearing with the attorney general. Times of Israel IDF Chief Urges Aid to Palestinian Security Forces Outgoing IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot reportedly urged the government to strengthen the Palestinian Authority security forces, noting they had thwarted a Hamas terrorist attack in the West Bank. In his farewell remarks to the cabinet on Sunday, Eisenkot said PA forces seized weapons and explosives in Area A of the West Bank. He said that the PA was working out of its own interests, and it was in Israel’s interest to strengthen the PA security apparatus. 2 Times of Israel Erdan: Israel Should Punish Abbas Over Gaza Measures Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan on Sunday suggested barring Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas from returning to the West Bank when he next travels abroad, claiming Abbas was “one of the main instigators of violence on the southern border” and contributed nothing to the diplomatic process. Erdan said Abbas was responsible for the ongoing turmoil on the Israel-Gaza border through his ongoing economic pressure on Hamas as he tries to break the terror group’s grip over the enclave. Times of Israel Funding Shortage Leads to Cuts in Palestinian Food Aid The World Food Program has suspended or reduced aid for some of its Palestinian beneficiaries in the West Bank and Gaza Strip due to funding shortages, an official with the organization said Sunday. Some 27,000 Palestinians are no longer receiving aid through the United Nations program since January 1 in the West Bank, said Stephen Kearney, the organization’s director for the Palestinian territories. Another 165,000, including 110,000 in Gaza, are receiving 80 percent of the usual amount, he said. Jerusalem Post Palestinians to Take Over Largest UN Bloc on Tuesday The Palestinian Authority is set to formally take the helm of the largest bloc of United Nation member states on Tuesday, known as the Group of 77 (G77) and China. Abbas will be in New York for Tuesday’s ceremony and is scheduled to meet with UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, the UN Security Council president and other world leaders. The G77 has recognized Palestine as member state since 1976. The group was first created in 1964 to advance the economic interests of developing countries, but has since expanded to include 134 of the UN’s 193 member states. Times of Israel Smotrich vs. Ariel in National Union Primary The National Union party will vote for its leader on Monday night, with freshman lawmaker Bezalel Smotrich competing against two-term leader Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel. The far Right party, which ran with the Bayit Yehudi list in the last election, is set to hold a vote among its 130 central committee members at a meeting in Jerusalem for its leader and its list for the next Knesset. In a poll conducted for the New Right, the party founded by Education Minister Naftali Bennett and Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked when they broke off from Bayit Yehudi, found that the remainder of the Bayit Yehudi-National Union bloc would get an additional two to three seats with Smotrich at the helm. 3 Forward – January 13, 2019 How President Rivlin Appeals To Diaspora Jews By Jane Eisner, Editor-in-Chief ● Israeli President Reuven Rivlin wants you to know that he is deeply concerned about the deteriorating relations between his country and Jews around the world, and he plans to do something about it. Which, in a surprising way, sets him apart from the rest of Israel’s political leadership. More surprising still, Rivlin seems to understand the Jewish Diaspora despite the fact that — unlike so many of his rivals — he has never lived outside Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu graduated from high school in suburban Philadelphia, went to college and graduate school in the States, and even was Israeli ambassador to the United Nations. Naftali Bennett, minister of Diaspora affairs, lived as a child in the United States and became rich there, too, after selling his tech company and making what the Israelis call his “exit” before entering politics. Both of them have repeatedly angered and alienated many American Jews who disagree with their approach to everything from the Iran nuclear deal to the anti-Semitic attacks in Pittsburgh last year. ● But Rivlin, born in Jerusalem, never left Israel until he was 29 years old, he told me in a conversation at the end of last month in the elegantly appointed Beit HaNassi, the official home of the president in Jerusalem. And yet he has positioned himself as a trusted interlocutor between the two uneasy branches of the Jewish people — half of whom now live in Israel, the other half of whom live mostly in the United States. “I really believe we are one family,” he said. At 79 years old, in the middle of his seven-year term as president, Rivlin appears like an avuncular grandfather (albeit one in a dark suit) eager to share stories from his childhood in a tone both insistent and friendly. But he also has not been afraid to express opinions at odds with the ruling government, even though he and the prime minister are both members of the Likud party. ● We met in his office, which doubles as a reception area, complete with chairs positioned for conversation and walls lined with books and art work, anchored by standing Israel flags. That morning, he spoke mostly about growing up in a family whose tenure in Israel predates the establishment of the modern Jewish state by nearly a century and a half. His ancestors arrived from Eastern Europe in 1809, directed to Israel by a rabbi who believed the Messiah was going to appear then. The prediction didn’t materialize, but the family put down roots, becoming the first Jews to settle outside the walls of the old city of Jerusalem. Rivlin was a Zionist from an early age, because he knew nothing else. “My family were pupils of [Ze’ev] Jabotinsky,” he said of the leader who championed an aggressive, some say right-wing, form of Zionism. “The only way to express a Zionist feeling is to come to Israel.” This Zionism could coexist with a healthy respect for, and interaction with, his Arab neighbors; Rivlin was strongly influenced by his father, an Arabic scholar who translated the Quran into Hebrew. For young Rivlin, the Diaspora was an abstract concept — until the siege of Jerusalem during Israel’s war for independence, when American Jews sent support in the form of Nestle’s chocolate, comic books and bubble gum. 4 ● Government was an abstract concept, too — until the Knesset relocated to Jerusalem after the war. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, lived in the same neighborhood, and Rivlin and his young friends played football next to the legendary leader’s home. Religious pluralism was perhaps the most foreign concept of all. “For me, there was no other shul all over the world than the shul I prayed in,” he recalled.